Subject: Scope of work

From: "Marcia Peters (8-444-4380)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Aug 93 13:41:25 EDT

Personally I'd like to get a better  idea of whether this group's goal is
to complete some extensions to RFC  1434 that everybody can implement and
ship in  the very  near future,  and claim  interoperability with,  or to
reinvent an architecture  with the sophistication and  scope of something
like APPN.  My impression from most of  you was that it's the former.  Is
that the general sense of the group?

The differences  between what  each contributor  prioritizes high  or low
seems to  depend on your view  of the market and  market requirements for
your product(s).  For  an interoperability standard, shouldn't  we try to
determine what areas  of market requirements the router  community has in
common,  and  let  the  less-popular  items  be  "towers"  indicated  via
capabilities exchange?

Comments/feedback welcome.

      Marcia
_________________________________________________________________________
 Marcia L. Peters                           mpeters @ ralvm6.vnet.ibm.com
 Advanced Peer-to-Peer Networking
 IBM Corporation
 Research Triangle Park, NC

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 10 Aug 93 00:20:17 PDT

Marcia -

    I thought I would wait for the groundswell of responses to this
    request but, since it's been a few days now with nothing, I guess I
    might as well reply.  The silence is deafening.

    I have a novel approach ... how about we let the marketplace decide
    how big DLSw gets.

    If APPN becomes a success and takes over as the backbone for future
    corporate internets, then DLSw will enjoy only a brief time in the
    sun and will have only limited APPN-like features such as directory
    services and diverse DLC support.  If TCP/IP remains strong, then
    the DLSw standardization effort will probably evolve to meet the
    customer requirements of keeping SNA on the fringes and out of the
    backbone.

    The market will tell us.

    In the meantime, adding incremental extensions to RFC 1434 makes the
    most sense.

Regards,
-----------
Wayne Clark
cisco Systems, Inc.
[email-masked]
415/688-4627

P.S. I find the pie charts on p. 51 of the August 2nd Network World
     quite interesting.